Commentary on pro-family issues in the media, politics and in the public square.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Is marriage ready for a comeback among Millennials? Maybe.

Part of the reason for the advance of same sex "marriage" in Minnesota and other states is a result of how devalued marriage as an institution has become. It's become whatever we want it to become. Life long commit? Forget it. Unilateral divorce. Man and woman? Unnecessary. It's whatever any two (and eventually more) people want it to be. Fidelity? No way. If someone else comes along no problem. (This is the next shoe to drop.)

Yet it appears there maybe an awakening among Millennials to look at marriage more seriously. Here's an interesting article by a St. Thomas professor and the feedback she's getting from students who she says aren't particularly religious.

It’s a cold, sleety Minnesota day, and I’m in a classroom with
25 undergraduate students, talking about marriage. This discussion is
the culmination of a mini-unit in which (among other things) we examined
sociological data showing worrisome marital trends in America.

We discussed how various social problems, particularly among the
poor, might be ameliorated through a strengthening of marriage. Charles Murray’s portrayal of “Fishtown,” combined with the New York Times’ “Two Classes, Divided By ‘I Do,’”
painted vividly the challenges that a weak marriage culture creates for
poor families. Now I put the question to the students: What might help?
How can we better encourage people to get and stay married?

A young man raises his hand. “This unit was interesting, but the
university should offer whole classes on marriage. A lot of people don’t
realize how important it is, for their kids and just for having a happy
life.”

Another hand. “They should talk about this in high school, too. It
seems like we heard a lot of warnings about drugs and dropping out and
safe sex. I don’t remember hearing anything about marriage.”

A third student chimes in, “Parents should talk with their kids about
it. Mine never did. I sort of wanted them to, but it was awkward to
ask, you know?” A number of heads nodded in agreement.

The first time I heard students talk like this, I was amazed. I have
rarely known undergraduates to be so self-aware. I would almost have
thought that they were telling me what I wanted to hear, had not long
experience taught me that students were thoroughly inept at discerning
what I wanted to hear.

Now, after several semesters of discussing marriage with my
introductory ethics classes, I’ve heard these concerns expressed enough
times to conclude that, for all their righteous zeal concerning sexual
freedom, undergraduates do actually know that they are confused about
marriage.

This is interesting, particularly since the young people in question
are not particularly religious or conservative. My students represent a
fairly standard cross-section of middle-class American 20-year-olds.
They can talk all day about the evils of global warming and homophobia,
but the decline of marriage is, for most of them, a fairly new subject.
Nevertheless, they are easily convinced that our society has a marriage
problem, because they know that they have a marriage problem, which their teachers and parents have done little to help them resolve.

To me, this frank uncertainty about marriage makes a fitting
centerpiece in the tragic tableau of today’s young Americans. They seem
to be almost perfectly unsuited to the social and political climate of
their time, like hothouse flowers whose cultivators failed to note that
they were destined to be planted in an alpine tundra. The problem, in a
nutshell, is this: young people want the right things (security, love,
and a prosperous life), but they have very wrong ideas about how best to
attain them.

Today’s undergraduates are not, for the most part, radicals and
revolutionaries. They harbor conventional hopes of professional success
and happy marriages. But while they believe that the first can reliably
be secured through hard work and dedication, marriage seems in their
minds to require a mysterious mixture of good fortune and good
chemistry, perhaps combined with the social status that they hope to win
through professional success.

Unfortunately, they have things exactly backwards. A good marriage is
the sort of thing that almost anyone can aspire to, regardless of
skills, education, or status. The most important ingredients for marital
success are within any individual’s power to attain. Professional
success, by contrast, does reflect hard work and commitment, but it also
depends on complex external factors that no individual person can
control. For today’s rising generation, those external factors are not
looking promising.

The students of private universities are, for the most part, children
of privilege, and they behave as such. David Brooks has written
extensively on this, and my observations agree largely with his: today’s
undergraduates are industrious, well-habituated rule followers who have
been superbly socialized to conform to the expectations of their
elders. They take it as axiomatic that they have obligations to
alleviate the suffering of the less fortunate through political action,
which is the duty they pay for their ideological commitment to equality.

At the same time, they regard it as their birthright to inherit the
prosperous and secure world that their parents mostly enjoyed. Even as
they stand on the cusp of significant political and economic change, I
find my students to be curiously uninterested in helping to reshape the
future. For the most part, they are content with their conventional
goals of upward mobility, material comfort, and marital success....

It is encouraging to find, at least, that many young people today are
open to learning more about marriage. They may be relieved to hear that
it is not, after all, such a mystery. Eons of wisdom can help us to
make sense of what it is, and how it works, and how it can be made to
work. Marriage has given structure and purpose to the lives of an
incredibly diverse array of people, across millennia of human history.
It can work for young Americans today. And the consolations of family
life could help to compensate for the other disappointments and
challenges that these over-optimistic youth are likely to encounter once
they move beyond the classroom.

Millennials want to hear this, and they need to know. If their elders
want to atone for the mistakes of yesteryear, now is the time to start
talking about marriage.